How do I effectively run a multichannel marketing campaign?

Multichannel marketing campaigns are a great way to raise brand awareness and create secondary touch points as you reach your audience through multiple channels. This means they are continually exposed to your campaign, which encourages them along the marketing funnel.

Understanding the different marketing funnel stages can help your brand strategically plan your multichannel campaign more efficiently to see higher returns and conversion rates. Within this blog, we will break down the different marketing funnel stages to help you understand which channels work best at each stage and look at the best practices for a multichannel campaign.

What are the stages of the marketing funnel?

There are many stages of the marketing funnel. Each step requires different actions to be taken, allowing brands to engage audiences and continually filter them into loyal returning customers. The term funnel represents the number of people reaching the bottom of the funnel decreasing depending on their needs and behaviours. Once you understand the actions needed at each stage of the marketing funnel, your brand can better target your channels to optimise the funnel seeing an increase the number of consumers reaching advocacy.

Awareness

The first stage of the funnel must be to engage consumers, so they have an awareness of who you are and the products or services you offer. The content you share must be open and engaging to reach consumers at any point in their purchase journey. This is the largest section of the funnel as it is the starting point and the highest touch point. So therefore, it is essential to get this right.

Whilst we do not recommend bombarding consumers with content, it is recognised that reaching them through multiple channels at once will increase interest, especially if the content is engaging. Social media ads, billboards and F2F campaigns are great channels to raise awareness.

Top tip – find a way to make your campaigns stand out as you’ll need to break through the many mundane ads customers consume daily. Or contact GottaBe! we create campaigns that get people talking!

Consideration

Your consumers now know of your product, service or brand and are looking for more information. A multichannel campaign can target them in several ways and remind them why your brand should be considered. Retargeting allows you to utilise digital channels to custom audience captures and engage consumers at a deeper level. This also is a chance to differentiate yourselves from the competition and make the consumer select your brand.

Paid social ads targeted at your audience or those who have visited your site will see consumer engagement lead to the next step (conversion) if they are provided with what they are looking for. Consumers need the pull to come back into the funnel if they have started to drift. Email marketing and pop-up ads can help, offering related content or reminding the consumer of the product they were looking for.

Conversion

Hopefully, by this point, your multichannel campaign has widened your reach to ensure that as many people as possible are considering making a purchase.

Things such as discount emails or posts can help to push the consumer into conversion as they are already engaged in the brand. Don’t forget that the consumer’s purchase journey must be easy to complete, so all your channels must complement one another.

A good multichannel campaign can reach consumers from different angles, increasing conversion rates. You can track your marketing efforts to compare conversion rates and determine which channels are most effective for your brand.

Loyalty/ Advocacy

Once a consumer has converted, keeping them loyal can be difficult, especially for FMCG brands that face high levels of competition. But once the consumer has converted, your brand can be more direct with targeted campaigns and, therefore, reach the consumer through even more channels.

Offering loyalty schemes through different channels is another great way to improve customer loyalty, alongside referral schemes promoting advocacy.

An excellent multichannel campaign will give the consumer consistency throughout the funnel, which allows them to build trust. Once they are happy with this, they will stick with what they know as long as they are satisfied, and brand purpose will increase.

How can we effectively utilise multichannel campaigns?

Now that we understand the marketing funnel, we need to investigate how to reach your audiences with a multichannel campaign. To know which channels are best suited to your audience, you will need to look at your audience profiles to identify the channels they are most likely to be exposed to and interact with. For example, if your audience is Gen-Z, your focus should be on social media and digital channels. In contrast, Boomers prefer traditional channels such as TV commercials and print.

Age and gender should not be the only considerations when discovering the best touch points for your multi-channel campaign. Our sister brand GottaBe! Ethnic specialises in reaching the 9.3 million ethnic minorities here in the UK. So, we know that each community has differing behaviours and needs which should be catered for. Not only does the material we share need to be in the correct language, but the channel also needs to be tailored. For example, we find great success reaching Eastern European communities through social media groups (Facebook), whereas South Asian communities respond better to community groups via WhatsApp. There are also 250 dedicated ethnic media channels brands can utilise to reach consumers directly.

One of GottaBe!’s most extensive and recent multichannel campaigns was our work with GO! Southampton on the launch of Re:Claim festival. The FREE city centre street festival featured music, sports, arts, gaming and more. The aim was to bring together Southampton’s diverse and creative community. To reach each group effectively, a multichannel campaign was imperative.

The campaign saw a minimum of 9 channels utilised to maximise reach, including paid and organic social media campaigns, ethnic merchandising and out-of-home advertising. The multichannel marketing campaign reached over 150,000 people, and footfall in the city increased by 51%.